Ballmer Suggests Linux Distros Will Soon Have to Pay Up

An anonymous reader writes "Via Groklaw comes comments from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at a UK event, in which the company once again threatens Linux distributions that haven't signed up with their program. '"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week ... Ballmer praised Novell at the UK event for valuing intellectual property, and suggested that open source vendors will be forced to strike similar deals with other patent holders. He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.'"

Comments

the reason microsoft won't show their patents

[SkunkPussy]

My guess is that any of Microsoft's patents could be coded-around trivially - therefore their patents, once revealed, have no value. Their only value is as a bargaining tool (cudgel).

OOXML

[jafoc]

I'm not authorized by Ballmer to speak about what he may have had in mind, if anything, but Microsoft claims that their OOXML file format which they're (despite the initial failure) still trying to get approved as an international standard can be used "on Linux" (this claim was made in the standardization committe on this matter in Switzerland, of which I am a member) and they are offering (unacceptable) terms and conditions for using their patents on this "standard".

Microsoft hasn't honored my numerous requests to provide a list of the patent numbers is question even though I demonstrated that the ISO/IEC directives say clearly that patents should be disclosed.